First up a fun video from the Norwegian crew who came to visit London and did the whole Disloyalty Card in a day.  Epic, heroic quantities of caffeine consumed!  Quite how they managed to cup with us halfway through the day remains a mystery.  I’m almost jealous of their coffee constitutions:

Next up are a couple of videos (the first two of a trilogy) focusing on brewing in Intelligentsia’s Venice store.  The desaturation of everything but the coffee ought to be really cheesey, but I think it works really well.  It also makes me want a massive 5 cup syphon!

Links:

Matt Webb’s talk

Coffee at Wikipedia.org

Questions for next week in the comments please!

These last few days have been a pleasant, but steep learning curve.  I know I’ve muttered about pressure profiling from time to time, but I hadn’t really played with a lever machine properly until Gwilym’s WBC prize arrived. ¹
I am not quite at the popeye arms stage yet, but I could see how you could incorporate a machine like this into a serious workout routine.  I have had some delicious shots, but I have had to abandon the traditional time frames I have used for espressos I know well.

Lots of little things make an impact.  The size of basket has a very strange impact – keep the dose the same, but have a bigger basket means that more water fills the chamber above the coffee meaning you will pull a longer shot.  Changing basket but keeping the dose the same has enough of a weird impact using my Cyncra, but this one single variable has a terrifying domino effect on the shot!

Gwilym came by today, he’s on his way to Italy to visit La Marzocco and wanted to pick up some coffee to play with.  We thought it would be fun to pull some shots of the same batch on the Athena that he’ll play with out there.  The impact of even tiny adjustments to pre-infusion time made an astonishing difference to the cup.

As you can see from the photo above I dug out my Gaggia naked portafilter, as I was curious to see what effect the lack of dispersion screw would have.  (This is the first machine I’ve used without one).  Turns out it is nothing noticeable, but then I am not sure how much detail can really, really be discerned from a naked portafilter.  They do still look pretty though.

Shot times appear to have gone out of the window.  Or at least the window has moved quite substantially.  People who go to Naples often seem to come back remarking on the 45 second shot time.  I haven’t had much under 35s that I’ve really liked, though I haven’t played much yet with barely any infusion so that may change things. ²

Now I’ve never been one to worship at the altar of crema, I don’t want more of the stuff, I don’t read too much into its texture or its colour.  However from an aesthetic point of view the shots from the Athena do look remarkable pretty.  Darker espresso roasts than ours mottle/tiger stripe in a wondrous manner (had some very tasty shots of Espresso Rustico from Counter Culture which I wished I had photographed because I think they’d be an interesting reference point for barista competition judging).

I can’t quite put my finger on exactly how the shots change.  I also admit that I’ve had more experience than most with pressure profiling, and the impact of soaks and ramps.  I do know that you can get some very interesting textural and taste based results (I am separating taste from flavour here), but I also know what a knife edge it can be.  I’d love to pull a few hundreds shots on one of these and see how you build a workflow around them, would it lull you into a pleasant and soothing rhythm or taunt you with its crawling pace.  Plus if you pull a choker then there isn’t much you can do except be patient. ³

I consider myself very lucky that Gwilym has kindly let us play with it.  If you are coming to roastery any time soon then I’ll probably try and force a shot or two onto you and talk in an overexcited way.  I am aware this post comes off the back of a post about how silly espresso is, and how we should all love brewed coffee, but from a personal point of view it is rare that I get the opportunity to go through a learning experience like this one.

I’ll try and post more about it all as I learn a bit more and have something solid and interesting to say.  If you have experience with lever machines then I’d love to know your thoughts.  If I have one gripe with the machine (and this is exceptionally churlish, considering I am borrowing a friend’s prize) it is that the cup tray is really quite tiny.  Petty?  Me?  No….

1. Yes, we kindly offered to ‘look after’ it for him for now…
2. For the record I would start the time the moment the lever is sufficiently pulled down that you can hear the water entering the brew chamber.  Other than that it is noticeable how eerily quiet the whole process is.
3. I have been told a couple of methods to interupt the brew, but frankly they either scare me or increase the likelihood of me making a mess of my clothes and I just can’t condone those things.

So – Gwilym’s performance:  I am sure pretty much everyone has worked out that we didn’t go to this competition with the main goal of winning. The idea this year was the same as the idea last year, and the year before that: give an interesting performance that one could are proud of.

I am also sure that by now people are doing what they always do with WBC videos. Watching, seeing the mistakes and asking how come they won despite these errors. This is the wrong way round. Every performance has its mistakes, and they are easy to find if you go looking for them. People seem to wilfully miss what made them stand out. Gwilym’s performance was exceptionally risky, assuming there was the potential to lose something important. To me it was entertaining, thought provoking and fun. Liz Clayton, as always, writes wonderfully here.

Gwilym Davies, United Kingdom – 2009 WBC Finals from nick cho on Vimeo.

With all of the last three winning performances available online I hope people will watch them and look for what connects them. The last three years have produced three very different champions, but I think there are strong commonalities in the performances. ¹  I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts.

Watching a friend compete terrifies me. I’d rather be on stage performing. Sadly this meant that I couldn’t even watch through gaps in my fingers, and had to run away and hide on the SCAA show floor while he performed. I am such a wuss. It isn’t that I don’t have any faith, it is just that I can no longer take the rollercoaster of emotions. There should be a support group for coaches/support teams during the performances.

One final note on the performance – whenever I watched it in rehearsals I was always really excited to see what the judges would pick. The combinations were always interesting and potentially tasty. I think if we had had more time we could also have worked it up to being maybe 6 different choices per judge, which would have been crazy but awesome. I was weirdly disappointed in the choices of the judges, though I don’t really know why. Maybe I was hoping they’d pick something we hadn’t done in practice. ²

Gwilym will be a great champion. He’s been an ambassador of coffee for a long time – he’s been out there converting people, making them excited about great coffee, giving lots of people that ‘a-ha!’ moment for years now. His interest in others is genuine, he’s knowledgeable and very approachable, no ego (yet – it happens to us all) and a healthy interest in twill woven materials.³

Check the reflection

The rest of the competition was great.  Not just the performances, but the people. It is great how quickly and easily conversation and friendship comes when you only see someone once a year to geek out about coffee and get angry about nerdy things.

My journey home was a bit of a mixed bag. I had to leave Sunday night, and they took so long to get to the announcements that I had to flee and got the results in the cab via twitter and a bajillion text messeages. I tried to change my flight and was told it would be a mere $1,800. I stuck with my flight. Which was three hours delayed. So I missed my connection and got stuck in Chicago, and told the next flight would be in 21 hours. Time to kill.

After a boring stay in a weird hotel, charging my phone off the usb port in the business suite because BA had lost my luggage, I headed into town. First stop was the place I’d heard so many shoutouts to – Intelli’s Broadway shop where Mike Phillips works. It was great – being an anonymous customer, ordering some coffee and sitting in the nerdiest spot and just watching. After about 15 minutes I called Mike. I felt terrible because I’d just woken him up by the sound of things. We chatted for a bit and he very (very) kindly agreed to meet me at the Intelli Roastworks around lunchtime. I have to say that the coffee I had there was the Anjilanaka from a Clover, and it was the first Clover brewed coffee I’d really enjoyed in a long time.

It was great to see Intelli’s roastworks, to catch up with Matt Riddle, but mostly it was great to just sit down and chat with Mike. His perfomances were great, he’s an utterly charming and likeable fellow and I could have talked shop with him for hours on end. I’m grateful to him and Matt for their hospitality during my stay. I really hope to see Mike compete again. I can’t thank him enough for taking the time to drag himself out of bed on a day that can’t have been much fun, to come to work and deal with a nerdy, demanding guest. Thank you.

Now some important stuff – some thank yous. First of all a massive thank you to Shawn from Public Market Coffee in Minneapolis for loaning us his Anfim for the competition. We can’t thank you enough, it made a world of difference to have a grinder we knew well, and a massive thank you to Keith for lugging it with him on the plane. There will be many things heading your way in the mail soon.

Thanks also to the lovely guys at Slayer for loaning us a grinder too, to allow Gwilym to serve two very delicious coffees to his judges. Sorry I didn’t really get a chance to get onto the show floor to have a play!

Thanks to everyone who came by the roastery and mock judged, offered their ideas and criticisims and their constructive feedback – both for the UK and for the WBC. It was incredibly useful and giving up your time and your ideas for free was incredibly generous.

Thanks to Chris and M’lissa Owens for buddying, helping and being (as always) utterly amazing, dependably awesome and working way harder than we had any right to ask of them.

Thanks to Octane peoples for setting the bar ridiculously high for hospitality and splendidness during a WBC.

Thanks to everyone who helped. It is and was appreciated, and I will stop listing names now for fear of trying to be exhaustive but missing someone out.

I know I’ve missed loads out but if I don’t post something now then I never will!

1. That isn’t a smug allusion to Anette’s skills at sourcing and roasting coffee – more about the performances themselves – though it would be remiss of me not to point out that she totally rocks!
2. I know that sounds foolish, but the constant novelty of the drink really appealled to me!
3. However I suspect his patience with the questions about living on a boat may start to wear thin.  I am sure if people kept asking me if I really lived in a flat then I’d go postal pretty quickly….